In May 2010, I lost $8m in a week. I was 23 years old. Back then, I was an interest rates trader for Citibank in Canary Wharf. I had won that job only three years earlier in a card game while I was a maths student at LSE. At that time, the job was the culmination of a lifetime ambition. It was also an escape route from poverty.
What do you do when you are 23, and you have just lost $8m? And you know that if you let slip a few dollars more, you will also lose your job? I did what anyone else would do. I worked. I started bringing my old economics textbooks on to the trading floor, and studied them into the evenings. I wanted to understand where I’d gone wrong.
One day, my wise trading sensei, a frosty haired, red-faced, hobbit-like, middle-aged Liverpudlian, who had never been to university, and who I will call Billy, slapped the textbooks out of my hands and into the bin.
“How old are you, mate? Does this look like Jackanory to you?! I know you’ve lost a lot of money, but you won’t find a penny of it in them books. If you wanna know what’s happening in the world, take a look at the world. Go take a walk down the high street. See all the shops closed down. Look at the homeless people under the bridge. Go home, and ask your mum about her financial situation. Ask your friends, ask your friend’s mums. The time for books is over, mate. You’re here now. Look at the world with your fucking eyes.”
So I went back home to Ilford, in east London, and I looked, and what did I see? My best mate had holes in his shoes. He used to jump over the Tube barriers on the way to work when no one was looking. Another friend’s mum had sold her house. Now he was sleeping on the sofa of her rented flat, trying to save up the deposit for a house, the cost of which was rising quicker than his savings. He still hasn’t bought it. Meanwhile, I worked every day on the second floor of a skyscraper in a room full of millionaires.
The next year, 2011, I placed a bet. It was a bet that the hundreds of billions of pounds of economic stimulus being poured into the UK and US economies would not reach the people who needed it. It would settle in the pockets of the richest, who would use it to buy the homes of the poor, and the economy would never recover. That year, I was Citibank’s most profitable trader in the world. They paid me $2m and asked me to do it again. It was around about then I realised the whole economic system wasn’t working.
This wasn’t the first time I made the most of Billy’s wisdom. He also taught me how, while working-class families suffer, those at the top are able to get away with it. My first budget day as a trader was in 2009. There was still a Labour government back then and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown were adamant it was time to tax bankers’ bonuses. I was a banker but a very poor, very young one. Around that time I slept on a broken mattress and used a little plastic hose from Argos to take showers while sitting in the bath.
I was worried. But I turned round to Billy, and Billy wasn’t worried. He was laughing. He was leaning back, pointing at me, and laughing. He stood up and grabbed me hard by the shoulders. “Don’t worry, Gal. They’ll never tax us,” he said.
I want you to remember this when you read about the budget this week. I want you to remember that traders don’t care about the budget, other than on the thankfully rare occasions when they are used by near-deranged new prime ministers to explode the economy.
Traders do not care about the budget, because the budget is not for traders and the budget is not about the economy. The budget is a piece of theatre meant for your consumption. It is a cute moment – a photogenic moment where a multimillionaire can hold up a red box and bribe you with a bit of your money, while they and all the other multimillionaires bankrupt the government with monetary and fiscal stimulus packages that seem somehow to always end up in their own pockets. They then use that money to buy assets such as all the houses that your children will need but never be able to afford to own.
And the traders, traders like me, we sit in skyscrapers and we laugh. Because we know that Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak, who are multimillionaires just like we are, will never tax us. We know that we will get richer and you will get poorer, and our lives will get better, and yours will get worse year after year after year. And each of us are paid millions of pounds every year to bet on it. To bet on it, instead of telling you.
For some reason, and most days I’m not quite sure why, I walked away. I’m here with you now and I’m telling you: the time for circus TV budgets is over, mate. You’re here now. Look at the world with your eyes. Don’t be distracted. Good luck.
Gary Stevenson is the author of The Trading Game: A Confession, published by Penguin (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
